ERIC EJ795173: Do Academic Origins Influence Perspectives on Teaching?

2007·0.09 MB·English

by  ERIC

SandraT Jeaarcvhiesr-S Eedliuncgaetri,o Jno Qhnu aBr.t eCrolyl,l iSnus,m &m Dera 2n0ie0l7 D. Pratt
Do Academic Origins Influence
Perspectives on Teaching?
By Sandra Jarvis-Selinger,
John B. Collins, & Daniel D. Pratt
Sandra Jarvis-Selinger
is director of research
Introduction
with the Division of
Continuing Professional Factors that influence the process of a teacher’s
Development and development are only partially understood. Some
Knowledge Translation researchers have shown that students enter preservice
of the Faculty of education programs believing that good teaching is
Medicine, John B. highly related to their knowledge and their ability to
Collins is an adjunct convey that knowledge to others (Powell, 1992;
professor in the Hollingsworth, 1989; Woodlinger, 1985; Weinstien,
Department of 1990). Feiman-Nemser et al (1988), for example,
Educational Studies of found that prospective elementary teachers begin
the Faculty of their introductory education course believing that
Education, and Daniel “teaching is telling” and that learning is reproducing
D. Pratt is a professor in what the teacher tells you. Although the authors
the Department of made no attempt to correlate specific disciplines with
Educational Studies of specific orientations to teaching, their overall find-
the Faculty of Medicine, ings suggest a possible relationship between disci-
all at the University of plinary majors and personal beliefs about teaching.
British Columbia, Yet we know from other research that the types of
Vancouver, British knowledge to be taught (and learned) do influence
Columbia, Canada. the approach a teacher takes. For example, using two
67
Do Academic Origins Influence Perspectives on Teaching?
of Habermas’ (1971) forms of knowledge (instrumental and communicative), Cross
(1991) and Cranton (2002) found that the sciences were more concerned with
transmitting instrumental knowledge, while disciplines that study human interac-
tions were more often concerned with facilitation of communicative knowledge.
This bespeaks differences not only in forms of knowledge, but in forms of teaching.
Moreover, Lattuca and Starak (1995) and Braxton (1995) found that disciplines such
as biology, physics, and chemistry tended to be less receptive to concerns for the
improvement of teaching (such as changing from transmission to facilitation) than
did the humanities and social sciences. Menges and Austin (2001) noted disciplinary
differences in the character of thinking that were fostered among students across
disciplines. And in a 1991-1992 survey, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance-
ment of Teaching found that faculty members held stronger affinity and loyalty to
their discipline than to their department or their institution. Presumably the common
commitment was established during training in their respective disciplines and
continued into their professional lives. Finally, Knight and Trowler (2000) found that
faculty members tended to take on the normative values, beliefs, and practices of
teaching within their discipline. They found, for example, that faculty members
believed that the teaching practices of their own discipline were not only appropriate
to that discipline but were generally preferable to forms of teaching found in other
disciplines. It seems that a culture of teaching exists within disciplines and that
students are, wittingly or not, enculturated into the norms of teaching and learning
that characterize their disciplines (Pratt & Nesbit 2000).
Thus we know that studying within a discipline, especially to a level
commensurate with an undergraduate or graduate degree, is a form of enculturation
into ways of thinking, forms of knowledge, and normative roles for both teachers
and learners. As Bird, Anderson, Sullivan, and Swindler (1993) suggest, preservice
teachers enter their B.Ed. programs as “experienced actors in the school that they
have attended . . . from that experience, they have formed beliefs about schooling,
teaching, and learning that are likely to vary with their histories and circumstances.”
It would not be surprising, therefore, to expect that students entering teacher
training from undergraduate degrees in science, for example, might hold beliefs
about teaching that differ from the beliefs of those who enter teacher training fresh
out of degrees in the arts or the social sciences. Yet we have little or no empirical
evidence to support or refute this contention; nor do we have evidence to say how
those normative beliefs might differ, if indeed they do.
To explore these questions and others, we tracked 356 teachers-in-training as
they exited undergraduate degree programs in a variety of specific disciplines and
entered a one-year intensive teacher-training program. This article reports on the
relationship between disciplinary majors and preservice teachers’ beliefs about
teaching, learning, and knowledge.
68
Sandra Jarvis-Selinger, John B. Collins, & Daniel D. Pratt
Methodology
Context
The authors work at a large research university in western Canada. All students
entering our secondary teacher education program must hold a bachelor’s degree
in a discipline that is deemed a “teachable subject.” Students applying to the
Faculty of Education’s secondary specialization first complete a bachelor’s degree.
The one-year Bachelor of Education program is similar to a post-baccalaureate in
the sense that students have already completed their undergraduate education. As
such, students entering teacher training have spent several years immersed in the
cultures of their respective disciplines and have been exposed to models of teaching
and to specific norms and conventions related to knowing, learning and teaching.
Together, these beliefs, norms, conventions, models, and expectations constitute
a “perspective on teaching” (Pratt, et al, 1998) that students bring with them to
teacher education.
Perspectives on Teaching
A perspective on teaching is an interrelated set of beliefs, intentions, and
actions linked to knowledge, learning, and the role of a teacher. It is a lens through
which educators view their work. They may not be aware of their perspective
because it is something they look through, rather than at, when teaching. Thus,
perspectives on teaching not only provide direction and justification for what one
does as a teacher, but they also form the epistemic basis for normative roles and
expectations regarding acceptable forms of teaching. Whether perspectives are
justified or even reflected upon, they nevertheless influence what is adopted, what
is adapted, and what is rejected when preservice teachers engage in their teacher
education programs (Powell, 1992; Knowles & Charvoz, 1989).
Assessing Perspectives on Teaching
During the 1990s, a group of researchers (Chan, 1994; Pratt, 1998; Pratt &
Collins, 2000) operationalized the themes and concepts uncovered in Pratt’s initial
grounded study of more than 250 teachers in Canada, the United States, China,
Singapore, and Hong Kong. Qualitative themes were converted into testable items,
which were eventually refined into a 45-item inventory for self-assessing one’s
perspective on teaching (Pratt &Collins, 1998). The Teaching Perspectives Inven-
tory (TPI) is used to assess prospective teachers’ orientations to teaching (Pratt &
Collins, 2000). This on-line instrument yields five qualitatively different perspec-
tives on teaching (www.TeachingPerspectives.com). By name, the five perspec-
tives are: Transmission, Apprenticeship, Developmental, Nurturing, and Social
Reform. None of these perspectives is inherently good or bad; they are simply five
substantively different orientations to knowledge, learning, and to the roles and
responsibilities of being an educator. Therefore it is important to remember that each
69
Do Academic Origins Influence Perspectives on Teaching?
of these perspectives represents a legitimate view of teaching when enacted
appropriately: conversely, each perspective also holds the potential for poor
teaching. The five perspectives are briefly outlined below with Appendix 1
providing a more detailed description.
· Transmission Perspective: Effective teaching requires a substantial commitment
to the content or subject matter.
· Apprenticeship Perspective: Effective teaching is a process of socializing students
into new behavioral norms and professional ways of working.
· Developmental Perspective: Effective teaching must be planned and conducted
“from the learner’s point of view”.
· Nurturing Perspective: Effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persis-
tent effort to achieve comes from the heart as much as it does from the head.
· Social Reform Perspective: Effective teaching seeks to change social structures
in substantive ways.
The 45-item TPI is divided into three sections: beliefs, actions and intentions.
Each of these three sections contains 15 statements that participants are asked to
rate on a 5-point scale. The TPI yields five global perspective scores—one for each
of the five teaching perspectives, and three sub-scores—beliefs, intentions and
actions—for each perspective. Scoring on any given statement ranges from 1 to 5
(strongly agree to strongly disagree or never to always), and global perspective
scores can range from 9 to 45 points. Table 1 shows examples of the TPI items.
Through its successive stages of refinement, the TPI showed early internal consis-
tency (Cronbach’s alpha) averaging about .80 with smaller and homogeneous
samples (Pratt & Collins, 1998) and about .71 with the current large and heteroge-
neous groups. Test-retest reliabilities were also calculated for a 182-person sub-
sample of those who had taken the TPI more than once. Of the then 35,000
respondents, approximately 3% have taken it a second time – and sometimes a third
or fourth. Test-retest reliabilities for each of the perspectives were Transmis-
sion=0.68, Apprenticeship=0.68, Developmental=0.62, Nurturing=0.76, Social
Reform=0.74, with an overall reliability of 0.73.
Once a person’s global perspective scores are calculated, each score is
compared against the mean of all five. A perspective is considered “dominant”
if its score is one or more standard deviations above the mean of the five (itself
included). Therefore, dominance is an ipsative characteristic calculated “within
participants” rather than normative (between participants) and is comparable
only to each individual’s overall pattern of answers on the Inventory rather than
to some absolute, arbitrary, or normative value. There is also firm evidence that
most seasoned educators hold one – and occasionally two – of these perspectives
as their dominant view of teaching, with one or two others as back-up perspectives.
It could not be otherwise, given that perspectives are composed of fundamentally
70
Sandra Jarvis-Selinger, John B. Collins, & Daniel D. Pratt
Table 1. Teaching Perspectives Inventory Example Questions
Example Questions in the Beliefs Section, that focuses on
‘what do you believe about instructing or teaching?’

Stongly Disagree | Disagree | Neutral | Agree | Strongly Agree
SD D N A SA
3. Most of all, learning SD D N A SA
depends on what one already
knows.
7. The best learning comes SD D N A SA
from working alongside good
practitioners.

Example Questions in Intentions Section, that focuses on
‘what do you try to accomplish in your instruction or teaching?’

Stongly Disagree | Disagree | Neutral | Agree | Strongly Agree
SD D N A SA
24. I expect people to SD D N A SA
enhance their self-esteem
through my teaching.
25. I expect people to be SD D N A SA
committed to changing our
society.

Example Questions in Actions Section, that focuses on
‘what do you when instructing or teaching?’

Stongly Disagree | Disagree | Neutral | Agree | Strongly Agree
SD D N A SA
31. I cover the required
content accurately and in the SD D N A SA
allotted time.

38. I challenge familiar ways SD D N A SA
of understanding the subject
matter.

different (and sometimes competing) beliefs about knowledge, learning, and
teaching.
Participants and Selection
We engaged the support of the Faculty of Education’s administration office in
requesting instructors to make a one-hour time slot available for us to gather
information from students. (Academic jurisdictions that would be called “Schools”
or “Colleges” elsewhere are termed “Faculties” at our university.) During this hour,
students completed the TPI and provided brief demographic and background
information. All instructors but one invited us to their course sections, thus yielding
71
Do Academic Origins Influence Perspectives on Teaching?
a study group of 356 out of the year’s total enrolment of 378 students seeking
secondary-school certification. Students seeking primary or middle-school certifica-
tion completed the TPI but were not included as part of this study because disciplinary
major plays a less important role in their program of studies and future careers.
Students enrolled in the secondary specialization complete a twelve-month
bachelor of education program that prepares them to teach one or two subject areas
in grades 7 through 12 (Jarvis-Selinger, 2002). Students first complete one term of
coursework (September to December) and then move into their practicum experi-
ences (January to April). During the final four months of their program, students
return to the university (May to August) to complete their final courses.
Disciplinary Majors
Students enter the teacher education program at our university with a variety
of academic backgrounds and experiences, and there is no single best way to classify
the wide range of their previous disciplinary majors. However, the Faculty of
Education itself maintains a 16-category system of secondary school specializa-
tions that designates which subject areas students are qualified to teach—given
their previous disciplinary majors and minors. For this study, these specializations
were regrouped to achieve more evenly balanced numbers and fewer overall
categories that better reflected the broader conceptual differences among people’s
disciplinary majors. A moment’s attention to the two- or three-letter abbreviations
preceding each of the eight categories and their respective numbers will simplify
interpreting upcoming tables and figures.
· Mathematics/Sciences (MS=51) included students in
Mathematics (n=18)
Chemistry (n=22)
Physics (n=9)
Science (n=2)
· Life Sciences (LS=64) included students in
Biology (n=57)
Environmental Science (n=7)
· Social Studies (SS=60) included students in
Geography (n=14)
History (n=46)
· Language Arts (LA=58) included students in
English (n=46)
French (n=12)
· Home and Technical Sciences (HTS=37) included students in
Home Economics (n=7)
Technical Education (n=30)
72
Sandra Jarvis-Selinger, John B. Collins, & Daniel D. Pratt
· Expressive Arts (EA= 15) included students in
Art (n=3)
Music (n=12)
· Business (BS=22) is a single-discipline category
· Physical Education (PE=49) is a single-discipline category
Results
Teaching Perspectives
Means and standard deviations were calculated across all eight disciplinary
majors on each of the five perspectives on teaching (see Table 2). One-way analyses
Table 2. Means and Standard Deviations for Eight Disciplinary Majors on Five
Teaching Perspectives.
N Transmission Apprenticeship Developmental Nurturing Social Reform
Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD
Math/Sciences51 35.98 3.69 35.25 3.43 35.57 2.87 36.06 5.30 27.43 5.66
Life Sciences 64 34.81 3.69 34.88 3.37 34.08 3.59 35.47 4.12 28.56 4.23
Social Studies 60 33.83 3.41 35.05 3.23 35.83 3.42 37.92 3.50 32.97 5.19
Language Arts 58 32.72 3.40 34.86 3.25 36.21 3.22 39.28 3.11 32.45 4.79
Home/
Tech Sciences37 31.89 4.84 36.84 3.91 33.68 3.91 38.38 2.91 31.76 4.86
Expressive 15 32.00 4.55 37.00 3.36 33.33 2.26 38.80 4.21 31.60 4.87
Business 22 32.82 3.55 36.68 2.80 34.50 3.02 38.14 3.99 30.77 4.56
Physical
Education 49 35.47 3.62 36.06 3.18 33.73 3.99 38.63 3.82 30.43 5.22
Total 356 34.02 3.97 35.53 3.39 34.84 3.54 37.63 4.12 30.63 5.29
* Note: Boldface italics indicate pairs of disciplinary majors different from each other at the .05 level.
Figure 1. Means for Eight Disciplinary Majors on Five Teaching Perspectives.
44
39
34 Trans
App
29
Dev
24 Nur
Sref
19
14
9
MS LS SS LA HTS EA BS PE
73
Do Academic Origins Influence Perspectives on Teaching?
of variance with Tukey’s paired comparisons show that disciplinary majors varied
in systematic ways for all five perspectives. Figure 1 plots the means for the five
perspectives across the eight different disciplinary majors. Nurturing scores are
generally high—in the upper 30s—for all disciplinary majors, while Social Reform
scores are generally low—in the upper 20s and lower 30s. It is important to examine
not only which perspectives are high or low, but also which of the groups are high
and which are low on each perspective.
Perspective Differences across Disciplines
Preservice teachers in both life sciences (LS) and math/sciences (MS) scored
significantly higher on the Transmission perspective than did people in language
arts (LA), expressive arts (EA), or home and technical sciences (HTS). As well, people
preparing to become physical education instructors (PE) scored equally high on
Transmission as prospective math/science teachers. Conversely, there were no
overall group differences in terms of Apprenticeship. On the Developmental
perspective, preservice teachers in language arts (LA) and social studies (SS) scored
significantly higher than preservice teachers in the life sciences, home and technical
sciences, physical education, and the expressive arts.
Prospective teachers in language arts, home and technical sciences, and
physical education scored significantly higher on Nurturing than those preparing
to teach in mathematics, sciences or the life sciences. Gender differences were also
noted on Nurturing: women’s scores showed small but significantly higher averages
than men’s scores. Finally, Social Reform showed the largest intergroup differences
of all. Students preparing to teach in social studies, language arts and home and
technical sciences scored significantly higher on Social Reform than those in the
life sciences or in mathematics/science.
Disciplinary majors where the content is well defined and where there can often
be an assumption of single right or wrong answers (math/science, life sciences, etc.)
are represented by students who are Transmission oriented and who see their task
as one of delivering the content in its authorized forms. In contrast, language arts
and social studies are dominated by preservice teachers who see their role from a
more Developmental perspective, that is, engendering deeper understanding and
promoting critical thinking skills.
Aspiring teachers with a dominant Nurturing perspective are encountered
more often among those preparing to teach language arts, physical education, or
home and technical sciences, while math/science and life science instructors show
less tendency toward nurturing. Similarly, language arts, social studies, and home
and technical science preservice teachers show a greater orientation toward
social-reform views, whereas people in the math/sciences rarely view their role as
one of reform. Interestingly, the absence of any systematic differences in Appren-
ticeship together with its generally high overall mean may suggest that teaching
in any of the disciplinary majors can profit by well structured apprenticeship
74
Sandra Jarvis-Selinger, John B. Collins, & Daniel D. Pratt
experiences such as job internships, career days, or intelligently crafted work
projects.
These differences of three to four points among different disciplinary majors
and three-quarters to one-and-a-half points for gender differences are statistically
significant. Recall, however, that people’s scores on the five TPI scales can
theoretically range from 9 to 45, a 36-point range. In actuality, their observed ranges
are from about 20 to 44 (except for Social Reform), or about a 25-point range. Thus,
the effective differences among groups amounts to about 3 or 4 points out of 25, or
12 to 16 percent of the range of observed scores. Overall, these differences in
people’s disciplinary majors account for about ten percent of the overall variance
in teaching perspective scores, with eta-squared coefficients averaging about
0.100. In contrast, eta-squared coefficients for gender average 0.011 or about one
percent of the variance; thus disciplinary background appears to account for about
9 times more overall variance than does gender.
The simple interpretation is that people’s views about themselves in their roles
as prospective teachers are linked significantly to their previous disciplinary majors
and to their gender, but less strongly. Together, these two factors still leave about
90 percent of the variance in teaching perspective scores unaccounted for. How else
might this still-unexplained variance be investigated?
Classifying and Predicting
A different and complementary approach is to use discriminant analysis to test
whether people’s profiles on the five TPI scales can be used to classify and predict
which disciplinary major they might belong to. Additionally, this procedure
examines whether all five of the TPI scales are really necessary and how much each
contributes to clarifying internal differences among the eight groups.
Stepwise discriminant analysis showed that all five TPI scales are important in
distinguishing one disciplinary major from another, but that they contribute
somewhat unequal weights in so doing.
Table 3 shows that Social Reform was initially the single best discriminator
among the eight groups (Wilks lambda=.86), followed (in sequence) by Transmis-
Table 3: Contribution of Each TPI Scale to Discrimination Among Disciplinary
Groups.
Percent of Variane Entry Correlation with
Variance Sequence Its Canonical Variable
Transmission 28.6 2 .96
Social Reform 19.5 1 .96
Developmental 17.9 4 .95
Nurturing 17.2 5 .96
Apprenticeship 16.7 3 .96
75
Do Academic Origins Influence Perspectives on Teaching?
sion (.75), Apprenticeship (.66), Developmental (.58), and Nurturing (.52). Further-
more, five canonical variables were required to maximize the discriminations
among the groups and these (rotated) variables were highly correlated with the
original five TPI scales. These canonical variables re-ordered the discriminating
power somewhat, but still retained all five of the scales.
The table shows several important things about the linkages between the five
perspectives on teaching and people’s disciplinary backgrounds. First, the
figures in the percent of variance column confirm that all five perspectives are
required to discriminate adequately among groups, and all five make sizable
contributions to the overall discriminating power among the different groups:
Transmission is the most at 28.6 percent and Apprenticeship the least, but still
sizable, at 16.7 percent. The entry sequence column shows that when people’s
perspective scores are examined serially one-by-one, their apparent ability to
discriminate one group from another is different from when they are examined
collectively. Social Reform initially appears to separate the groups most clearly,
but in later stages of the analysis, Transmission does the best job; Social Reform
moves into second place, followed by Developmental, Nurturing, and Appren-
ticeship. Finally, the correlation column indicates that the canonical variables
(mathematical abstractions which most clearly discriminate among the groups)
are tightly correlated with the five perspectives scores themselves.
Discriminant analysis also allows a classification/prediction summary on the
basis of the overall TPI profile of each group. Since it is known which preservice
teachers actually belonged to which disciplinary group, the classification summary
tests how accurately each individual’s group membership can be inferred from his
or her TPI profile alone. Table 4 presents these results in percentage terms.
The table further shows that based on their TPI profiles, people with a math/
science background were most likely to be classified correctly (39.2%), but that
some math/science teachers (23.5%) looked like they might have life science
backgrounds instead. Similarly, most preservice teachers with social studies
backgrounds were correctly classified (36.7%), but several (25%) had profiles rather
Table 4: Classification/Prediction of Disciplinary Background.
Actual Group Predicted Group Membership
Membership MS LS SS LA HT EA BS PE
Math/Science 39.2% 23.5% 9.8% 9.8% 3.9% 0% 0% 13.7%
Life Sciences 25.0 31.9 14.1 6.3 4.7 0 0 10.9
Social Studies 10.0 11.7 36.7 25.0 3.3 0 0 13.3
Language Arts 10.3 10.3 17.2 43.1 8.6 0 0 10.3
Home& Technical 0 10.8 13.5 16.2 45.9 0 0 33.3
Expressive Arts 0 0 6.7 0 60.0 0 0 22.7
Business 4.5 13.6 22.7 13.6 22.7 0 0 22.7
Physical Education 8.2 22.4 10.2 16.3 14.3 0 0 28.6
76